


Bottle Rocket Principle

by Vongchild



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, K-Day, Pre-Canon, Pre-Movie, San Francisco, Trans Tendo Choi, alternate character history, ftm character, transgender character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-26
Updated: 2013-09-26
Packaged: 2017-12-27 16:02:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/980882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vongchild/pseuds/Vongchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tendo Choi is a self-made man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bottle Rocket Principle

**Author's Note:**

> Presented with gratitude to Quigonejinn and Everbright, utmost respect to the transgender community, and a lot of handwaving about the medical stuff.  
> I have been informed that this needs a trigger warning for in-depth explorations of gender dysphoria.

 

When Tendo Choi is seventeen, he practices his swagger in front of his bedroom mirror every day before school, and his mother tells him, “Stop walking like that. It’s unladylike.”

“Gag me with a spoon,” says Tendo, with perfect, practiced, Catholic schoolgirl rebellion. His mother looks like she is honestly considering the request, but instead she waves him out the door with a warning about being late for Mass. Tendo thinks about ditching and smoking behind the dumpsters with the bad kids from the boys’ school but they keep trying to get up his skirt lately and think it’s funny when he won’t let them. So he goes to Mass and makes a point of singing just _slightly_ off-key and the stern sister keeps giving him dirty looks but what’s she going to do? At least Tendo’s _there_.

Last year, his grades were bad and he spent a lot of time thinking about dropping out and disappearing. This year, he’s got a physics teacher who calls him _Mr. Choi_ for his short hair and his _don’t-fuck-with-me_ stance and it started as a joke but it’s not anymore. That teacher gave Tendo a copy of _Boys Don’t Cry_ tucked inside a homework assignment and Tendo swears to God, he’s never been good at sitting still but he was paralyzed for all two hours of that movie. But it’s not like he had some kind of huge epiphany or anything. Angels did not appear to Tendo Choi strumming harps and ringed in light and they did not place a delicate wreath of masculine pronouns around his head, because he’s been calling himself those secret words since he was five years old.

Nah. He just returns the disk and says, lowly, “I liked it, can you keep calling me Mr. Choi,” and Dr. Culpepper hands the disk back and tells Tendo to _keep it_.

Tendo joins the Physics club, and every Saturday morning at nine, he marches out onto the soccer field and while the Lady Crusaders run laps in their cleats, he blasts tiny plastic rockets into the stratosphere.  He doesn’t want to be an astronaut, but he thinks the guys at mission control in the old Mercury and Gemini clips have _mad style_. He buys a pair of suspenders. His mother takes the suspenders and runs them down the garbage disposal. “Unladylike,” she _tsks_.

Tendo’s got no plans to be a lady, and he bites his tongue. There is a bottle rocket in his throat, the fuse burning in his belly, and when they call the name he doesn’t call himself at graduation, it ignites.  He throws his pretty white graduation dress in the trash chute on the way out of the apartment building, thinks about tossing the rosary his mother gave him in after it, but sentimentality holds him back. He loops it around his wrist instead, under the cuffs of his too-big sweatshirt, and when he catches sight of himself in the security mirror in the elevator he looks – not how he wants to look, but closer than he did yesterday morning.

The only thing he knows for sure is that he’s not going to go home until he absolutely has to. There are things Tendo Choi wants out of life that he’s not going to get inside his mother’s apartment. He gets on the first streetcar of the day and rides it until the line bottoms out down by the water. As he walks around, he drinks a cup of black food cart coffee – the kind his father used to say would put hair on your chest, while he kept his cup carefully out of Tendo’s reach.

He winds up wandering around in front of the ferry office on the wharf, tapping the empty coffee cup against his teeth. There’s a commotion inside the office, and Tendo’s always been a little bit nosy. He steps closer to the plate glass and listens and it sounds like someone’s getting fired. He hears a phone slam back down into the cradle and someone stomping across the office and then the door flies open. A mountain of a man with a mustache like a bull walrus stares down at him.

“Hey, kid,” he says. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” says Tendo, pitching his voice down.

“You want a job? I’ve got a ferry full of tourists leaving for Angel Island in an hour and a steward in a drunk tank in San Jose.”

Tendo hadn’t come down here looking for a job, but he thinks about all the things he could do with an income of his own and he likes what he’s thinking about so he says, “Yes, sir,” and follows the man into the office.

“What’s your name?” the man asks, setting out a uniform shirt and pair of pants. “Those’ll probably be big on you, but they’re the smallest size I’ve got handy.”

Tendo clears his throat. “Tendo Choi,” he says, and the man nods.

“Right,” he says, and waves Tendo off to the men’s room. When he locks the door behind himself, Tendo grins at his reflection and feels like he’s pulling off some phenomenal heist. The shirt is too big, like it was probably going to be. Tendo buttons it over his doubled-up sports bras and he likes the look of the scrappy young man who stares back at him, all hungry dark eyes and starched blue collar. He puts on the pants, and they’re too big, too, but he threads his belt through the loops and cinches it around his waist and the extra fabric hides the curve of his hips. He slicks his hair back with a bit of water from the sink and resolves to buy gel.

He spends the day running errands for the captain and enjoying fantastic views of the bay and getting called _sir_ and _young man_ by the passengers and after the last tour disembarks at nine, the boss pays him five crisp twenty-dollar bills and says, “Same time tomorrow.” Tendo changes back into his street clothes before he goes home, and when his mother demands to know where he’s been, he says he got a job and leaves it at that.

At the end of two weeks, the boss says he’s got to put Tendo on the payroll for tax purposes and Tendo freezes, because getting paid in checks and getting taxed means using his legal name, and so far he doesn’t think anyone’s even looked at him twice. Maybe if he doesn’t make a big deal out of this, it won’t be a big deal? He fills out the form and slides his California drivers’ license across the desk. The boss looks at it. Then he looks at Tendo, and Tendo’s stomach rolls. “What’s this name?” the boss asks.

Tendo says, “Work in progress, sir.”

The boss nods. “Aren’t we all,” he says.

Tendo relaxes for the moment, but there’s that bottle rocket feeling again. He thinks he knows what it is now – it’s ambition burning up inside of him, vinegar and baking soda. Bubbling.   _That’s right_ , he thinks. _I’m a work in progress_. He goes home, to the bedroom where no matter how many posters he puts up, the walls are still pink, and Tendo scrawls out a list of everything he wants out of life, with bullet points for how he’s going to get it. This room cannot contain him. “I’m moving out,” he tells his mother.

“Don’t be stupid,” she says. “Where will you go?”

“I got a place with some friends,” says Tendo, and he packs, and he doesn’t take no for an answer and what’s she going to do, anyway? He’s eighteen. She can’t stop him. The apartment’s a loft in Oakland, and it’s shitty and there are roaches in the kitchen and he’s sharing it with three girls he knows from high school, but the only real drawback is he wishes they’d all stop leaving their diva cups to dry on the bathroom counter. It’s not his mother’s apartment, and that’s all he cares about. It means he can buy the kind of underwear he’s always wanted and no one will give him odd looks when it turns up in the laundry, and replace his sports bras with something that actually flattens him the way he wants it to.

It’s a week before his father calls, long distance from Shanghai at an odd hour for both of them. “Your mother says you moved out,” he says in Cantonese, which Tendo has always understood far better than he speaks it.

“Yeah,” says Tendo, in English.

“Is your hair still short?” his father asks. Tendo wonders how that question unpacks, if it’s just his father commenting on how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other or if there’s more to it, a more that starts with getting caught behind the gymnasium with his first girlfriend back in Junior year and continues though the tale of the shredded suspenders. He’s bought a new pair since moving out, and a slick button-up and a red bowtie and hair gel and he’s admiring himself in the mirror even while he’s cradling the phone between his shoulder and ear.

“Yeah,” says Tendo. “It’s kind of – you know, Elvis?” _Lady-killer_ , he thinks to his reflection.

“Everyone knows Elvis,” says his father, and sounds a little like he’s laughing. “Is that the style for girls now?”

Tendo gives his reflection a bracing look. “ _Ba_ ,” he says. “I’m a boy.”

There’s silence on the line for a long time, but it doesn’t go dead. Finally, his father says, “We’ll talk about this later.” And he says something about love but it feels perfunctory and then he hangs up. Tendo scrubs a hand across his chin and wishes he had stubble.

The first thing Tendo does when he finally gets his insurance card from work is get his teeth cleaned, because his mother has instilled in him certain values he can’t shake and good oral hygiene is one of them. The second thing he does is go to the doctor that the man on the forum recommended and when they do his interview and run his blood work and say he can start in a month, part of Tendo is relieved and part of Tendo wants the answer to be _today_. He prints off a calendar and posts it on his bedroom mirror – countdown to liftoff.

At work, the rest of the crew notices he’s more anxious than usual and they tease him – “You got a hot date, Tendo?” – and Tendo can give it as good as he gets, shouts back, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” and gets called away to help an elderly couple up the gangplank. Working on the ferry's a hard job, but it keeps him busy and he likes that about it, how he always goes home and feels like he’s accomplished something, how he’s learning to talk about the city he’s grown up in like he actually knows a thing or two about it. How he’s got his sea legs.

It’s a week short of what Tendo’s thinking of as his launch date when his mother shows up at the loft, and no matter what his roommates try to say to calm her down, that doesn’t change the fact that Tendo’s standing there in a man’s uniform with his chest bound flat. He figures out what’s happened pretty quickly – his father must have said something, and this is the fallout, his mother shouting at him to “come home and stop acting like this, you’re an embarrassment.”

“Ma, we’ve got neighbors, keep it down,” says Tendo, and he tries to get her to sit in the overstuffed armchair that they bought for ten dollars from the previous tenants, and when that doesn’t work, he offers to make her some tea, and when that doesn’t work, he digs in his heels and shouts that he is an adult with his own job and his own money and he can live however he wants and how he wants to live is as a _man_ , god damn it, and he is going to do it.

Tears are shed. Tendo wonders if the _god damn it_ was a bit overboard. 

Then his mother leaves and more tears are shed, but it doesn’t once occur to Tendo that he should back out. There are seven days left on his countdown and if he’s waited this long then there’s no turning back now. He knows who he’s meant to be. He’s ready. Then, one of his roommates knocks on his door with a pizza and a six-pack of beer from the gas station that never, ever cards and Tendo sucks up his self-pity. “Boys don’t cry,” he jokes. She does not laugh.

“Yeah, they do,” she says.

His father calls around midnight, something about being sorry things blew up the way they did. “Yeah, sure, whatever,” says Tendo. “Call me when you’re actually going to bother visiting your _family_.” He worries the beads of the rosary around his wrist and only half-listens when his father talks about paternal affection. Perfunctory? Maybe. Tendo’s being hard to love right now and he knows it. There’s so much acid in his voice that his mouth tastes sour.

Maybe his father takes his words to heart, though, because some four months later, he says he’ll be stateside for a week coming up. Tendo spends what feels like an entire afternoon – but is actually just his lunch break – staring at his face in the men’s room mirror, and he knows that it has changed but he can’t articulate how. Are his cheeks slimmer, his jaw firmer? This morning one of his roommates said he looked thinner. His watch beeps a warning about the one o’clock ferry.

Tendo goes alone to pick his father up at the airport. When they find each other in the baggage claim, they stare at each other for long enough that it’s awkward. “Well,” says his father, breaking the pawn lock with a hug. “You’re all grown up.” Tendo tries to relax but something in his back won’t let him. “What is it you’re calling yourself these days?”

“Tendo,” he says, taking his father’s suitcase. His father nods and follows Tendo to the car, and when he gives driving directions, they’re not to the apartment he pays for that Tendo’s mother lives in, but to an address in Chinatown. Tendo’s heart lurches and he feels unprepared and maybe a little betrayed. “We’re going to see Yeye?” he asks.

“I trust that’s not a problem,” says his father, slipping into Cantonese, which Tendo finds irrationally aggravating at a moment like this. He’s ten years too old for these bilingual games and never going to answer in anything but English.

“Yeye doesn’t know that I’m a boy,” says Tendo. He’s been putting it off, debating if it’s worth it to never see his grandfather again if it means avoiding rejection. His father reaches over and pats Tendo’s hand as he puts the car into park.

“Yeye will understand,” he says, and Tendo follows him up the stairs to his grandfather’s apartment, wonders – his father told his mother. Who else has he run his mouth to? He trusts his father less and less by the second. Every instinct says turn around, get in the car, and drive home, you’re in some kind of fucked-up good cop-bad cop intervention scenario, but they’re already at the door and Yeye is hollering that he’s coming, don’t be so impatient.

The door opens. Tendo stares at his grandfather for the first time since high school graduation – eight months ago, almost. “You look just like he did at your age,” says Yeye, gesturing back and forth between Tendo and his father, and the Cantonese isn’t as frustrating coming from someone who Tendo knows barely speaks anything else. “Be mindful of your hair or you’ll lose it all.”

It turns out they’re meeting Tendo’s mother for dinner somewhere swank, where his bowtie gets an approving nod from the host. It’s a nice gesture, or else his father just feels like he’s got to throw money around since he’s always going on about how his job is so important that he doesn’t have time for his family. Tendo’s mother looks like she’s about to cry every time their eyes meet, and it puts him off his steak completely.

“Give her time,” his father suggests at the end of the week, when Tendo drives him back to the airport. “She’d rather have a son than no child at all.”

“What about you?” asks Tendo. “You said we’d talk later. Now’s later.”  They are on the bridge, crossing the bay. His father stares out to sea.

“The world’s changing,” he says. “I want you to be whoever you have to be and nothing less.”

It’s not cheap black coffee that puts hair on Tendo’s chest. Medicine and time does that. Time and hard work moves him up the ranks at the ferry, and time and paperwork gets him a federally issued ID with the right name on it, and an _M_ where it was always supposed to be.

Time does not make his mother wring her hands any less about the daughter she never really had, and it hurts but – he is who he has to be. But it’s not her rejection that makes Tendo chose to go to his grandfather’s aid the day Tresspasser breaks through the bridge. Or, at least, he tells himself that after. He tells himself that his mother was young and able-bodied and could have gotten out on her own, and that his grandfather was old and infirm and needed his help and it had nothing to do with family politics. Who could think of family politics in a time like—

In the end, he saves neither, and his grandfather’s dying command of _endure this_ rings in his ears the same way a nuclear explosion does.

For years later, Tendo Choi wears a wooden rosary around his wrist that was given to a Catholic schoolgirl on the occasion of his graduation. 

 


End file.
